What Is Everything Made Of?

Put your hand flat on a wooden kitchen table.

Now zoom in. Past the grain, into the wood itself: long thin cells packed side by side, each one a hollow tube. Zoom into a cell wall and there are molecules, mostly long chains of sugar. Zoom into a molecule and there are atoms. An atom is a tiny core of protons and neutrons inside a cloud of electrons. And protons and neutrons are made of quarks.

Then you reach the bottom of the textbook: electrons and quarks. Nobody has found a part inside an electron. Nobody has found one inside a quark. The textbook's answer to "what is it made of?" runs out at things with no parts to name.

That's an odd place for the question to stop. What is an electron? Not what it does. What is it?

Here's a way in. Light a candle and watch the flame for a minute. It holds one shape: the same teardrop, the same height, the same steady glow, for as long as the candle lasts. On a good candle that's hours.

Now ask what the flame is made of. Burning wax vapor. And that vapor doesn't stay. It rises, burns and leaves as hot gas out the top, all in a fraction of a second. None of the vapor in the flame now was in it a second ago.

So what is the flame? It isn't the material, because the material is replaced every second. The flame is the shape the material keeps making on its way through. It's a pattern that holds.

The flame is a drawing of what a table is, and what an electron is, and what you are. The rest of this post is about the real thing it draws.

The short answer

Everything is made of events. At the bottom there's no stuff and there are no tiny balls. There's one permanent record, and everything in the world is a pattern of entries in it.

Here's the whole answer in six steps. The rest of the post takes them one at a time and shows how we know each one.

1. Everything is made of events. An event is one difference registered. Every event is written into one permanent record as one entry, and nothing in it is ever erased.
2. One process writes the record. Two units pass a bit (a single yes-or-no mark) back and forth, and each pass is one entry. A pass is one step of the process, called a tick. That's the bottom layer of physics.
3. What lasts is rhythm. The process can start 64 ways. Within three ticks, 60 of them fall into coin-flip randomness. Exactly 4 keep an unbroken rhythm forever. That's a count, not an opinion.
4. A thing is the pattern of entries it keeps writing. Every entry is new, and the pattern is what stays. That's what a flame is, and a table, and a tree, and you: not material that lasts, a pattern that holds.
5. The record has one shape, and nobody picked it. One price for being different. Levels that step by 1.618. Three dimensions. A shortest full pass of eight ticks. Each one is what's left when you ask what the record requires.
6. Mass is the price of holding a pattern. A pattern costs something to hold, and that cost is its mass. The last section says exactly where our work stops.

Why this matters: "what is it made of?" sits underneath every other question about the world. If the bottom is stuff, a table is a heap of stuff, and so are you, arranged cleverly. If the bottom is a record of events, a table is a pattern that holds, and so are you, and the record that writes the table writes you too. Part 1 of The Universe Writes in Pen asked what you are, and the answer was a rhythm in the record. This post asks the same question about everything else, and the answer has the same shape.

That changes what "made of" means and what "the same thing" means. It also explains why your atoms can be swapped out one by one and you stay you.

Here's the route. I'll stop after each step to zoom out, so you always know where we are, what we've got, and why the next step comes next. (New here? The Ledger is our drawing of the permanent record. The face is a drawing. The record is not. It has one word: "Noted.")

Step 1: Everything is made of events

The bottom layer is events: differences, registered and written into one permanent record. Here's how we know, starting with a scratch on your table.

Run a key along the edge of the table. (Don't. Just imagine it.) Now there's a scratch.

That one sentence leans on three plain facts. Every observation does.

1. Things can be told apart. Scratched wood isn't smooth wood.
2. Comparing two things needs information about both. "Scratched" means "different from before." Something has to hold the before while you look at the after. With no before on hand, you don't have a scratch. You have wood.
3. Looking is a new event. You checking the scratch doesn't change the scratch. It adds a new moment after it.

Look at what's missing from that list. None of the three facts mentions stuff. All of them are about differences and about registering them.

Follow those three facts all the way through and you reach one shared record of every event. (Part 1 walks the whole route with a cup of coffee, and The Actuals tells the same starting story from a sandwich.) Every event goes into it, one after another, and no event ever reaches back and changes an earlier entry. The past still exists: every event that has happened is still in the record, written down. The Universe Has No Delete Key is a whole post on that.

Here's what matters for this post. The record isn't a description of things. It's what things are made of. When two things bump into each other, the bump is the entry. Nobody holds a pen. The writing isn't done to events. The writing is the events.

So there's no page under the entries, and no ink. The entries are all there is. The scratch on your table isn't a lump of stuff with a difference added to it. It's differences, registered. So is the grain, and so is the knock when you rap on the wood.

A scratch from last Tuesday? Noted. Still there, in pen.

Zoom out. Step 1 is done. The bottom layer is events, written into one permanent record that has no eraser. The table, the scratch and the knock are all made of them. Next, and why: something writes that record. If we can watch the thing that does the writing, we can see which patterns it keeps and which it loses.

Step 2: One process writes the record

One simple process, repeated everywhere below the level of atoms, writes the whole record. Two units sit side by side and pass one bit back and forth, and each pass is one entry. That's the bottom layer of physics: the step every larger event is built from.

Part 1 watches the process run, tick by tick. Here's all this post needs from it.

I'll draw the two units as two little clocks joined by a loop of wire. The clocks are a drawing of the real process, and what they do is what the real process does. Each clock either holds a token or doesn't. Every tick, which is one step of the process, each clock passes what it holds to the other, and the record gets an entry for what happened.

Watch the simplest rhythm, the swing. Set both clocks to keep whatever they receive, and put a token in the left clock. Tick 1: the token hops to the right clock. Tick 2: it hops back. Tick 3: right again. The record reads right, left, right, left, for as long as the process runs.

Two things about that page. Every line on it is new. Tick 3's entry isn't tick 1's entry coming around again. It's a fresh entry, written once, in pen. And the pattern repeats: right, left, right, left. The entries are all new, and the pattern is what stays.

Keep hold of that. It's the answer to this post's question in miniature, and Step 4 puts it to work.

Zoom out. Step 2 is done. One process writes the record: two units passing a bit, one entry per tick. The swing writes new entries every time, in the same pattern. Next, and why: the swing is one way the process can run. It can start 64 ways. Which of them hold a pattern, and which don't?

Step 3: What lasts is rhythm

Of the 64 ways the process can start, exactly 4 keep an unbroken rhythm forever. The other 60 fall into coin-flip randomness within three ticks. Here's how the count comes out.

Each clock is full or empty, and has one of four settings, so it has 2 × 4 = 8 ways to be. (A setting says whether the clock keeps or flips what it receives, and which kind of tick it's tuned for. Part 1 has the details.) Two clocks make 8 × 8 = 64 ways to start.

Run all 64. Some ticks send one unit of flow round the loop. Some, where both clocks are full or both are empty, send nothing round. A setting is tuned for one of those two kinds of tick, and on the other kind the clock is out of its depth, so it tosses a coin to decide. Once a coin is deciding, the rhythm is gone. The process stutters, goes quiet and starts again, with a coin choosing every step. By tick 1, 48 of the starts have a coin in the loop. By tick 2, 56. By tick 3, 60.

Meet Gary, who has the same problem. Gary is a drummer whose coin decides each beat. He sounds fine for a while, because lucky streaks happen. Keep listening and the gaps show up. Gary is not getting the gig.

Four starts never toss a coin: the swing you watched in Step 2, and its cousin the spin, where the token stays put and the flow circles the loop the same way every tick. Each comes with the token starting on the left or on the right. Nothing ever puts a coin in their loop, so every move they make is certain, forever.

That's a count, not an opinion. The process is small enough to run every case.¹

Look at what the count says about lasting. Most ways of running the process leave no steady pattern at all. A pattern that holds is rare, and when it holds it holds exactly: it never misses a beat. And look at what the four are made of. Entries, new every tick. What lasts in the record isn't stuff. It's rhythm.

Part 1 follows these four rhythms into what you are. This post asks what lasting means for a table.

Zoom out. Step 3 is done. Of 64 ways to start, 60 fall into coin flips within three ticks and exactly 4 keep an unbroken rhythm forever. What lasts is rhythm, not stuff. Next, and why: if what lasts is a pattern of new entries, then a thing, anything that lasts, is a pattern. Step 4 says what that does to a table.

Step 4: A thing is its pattern

A thing is the pattern of entries it keeps writing, and nothing else.

Here's how we know. Ask what else a thing has. Suppose your table had a secret ingredient, something that took part in no event at all. It never changed how light bounced off the table, how the wood felt under a hand, or what a scale read, and nothing ever recorded it. An ingredient like that would make no difference to anything, anywhere. It wouldn't be part of the table. It wouldn't be a property of anything. So a thing has nothing beyond what it writes, and its pattern of entries is all of it.

That's the candle flame again. The flame's material is new every second, and the flame stays the flame, because the flame was never the material. It's the shape the material keeps making. In the record every entry is new, and a thing is the rhythm they keep.

Now run it down your table, one zoom at a time. The table is a pattern of cells. The cells are a pattern of molecules, the molecules a pattern of atoms, and the atoms a pattern of electrons and quarks. And an electron or a quark, the bottom of the textbook, is a pattern of entries in the record.

Under the entries there's nothing else: no smaller bits, no stuff for the pattern to be made of. The entries are the bottom.

That's the surprise at the end of the zoom. The bottom isn't a smaller kind of stuff. It isn't stuff at all. It's things happening, written down.

A flame holds its pattern for hours and a table for decades. That's a difference of degree, not of kind. Both are patterns that hold. Part 1 says most of what you were made of as a kid has been swapped out, and you stayed you. A tree takes in air and water, drops its leaves, grows new ones and stays that tree. Same answer every time: the material was never the thing. The pattern is.

Yeah-But has been waiting. "Yeah, but if everything is just a pattern, then nothing's real."

A flame is a pattern, and it still burns your finger. A pattern isn't a lesser thing than stuff. It's the thing. What goes away is only the idea that something solid sits underneath it.

Zoom out. Step 4 is done. A thing is the pattern of entries it keeps writing. A flame, a table, a tree and you are patterns that hold, and so is the electron at the bottom of the textbook. Next, and why: patterns hold inside a record, and the record has a shape nobody picked. Once we have it, we can put a price on holding a pattern.

Step 5: The record has one shape

The record isn't arbitrary. It has one shape, and nobody picked it: one price for being different, levels that step by 1.618, three dimensions, and a shortest full pass of eight ticks. Ask what the record requires and each one is what's left. Each has its own post with the conditions spelled out, and here's the short version of all four.

One price for being different. When two things differ by a ratio x (one is x times the other), the price of the difference is

J(x) = (x + 1/x) / 2 - 1

Try x = 2, one thing twice the other: (2 + 1/2) / 2 - 1 = 1/4. Equal things, x = 1, cost nothing. Swap the two and the price doesn't change: x = 1/2 costs 1/4 as well. Ask for a price with five properties: no jumps, the same either way around, zero at a perfect match, one rule for combining prices, and one calibration to set the scale. Exactly one function has all five.² Step 3 of Is Your Coffee Mug Conscious? has the full price list.

Levels that step by 1.618. The record is built in levels. Ask that every level be the one beneath it times the same number r, and that the first new level join the two levels below it. Then r × r = r + 1, and exactly one positive number works: 1.618..., the golden ratio.³ Why the golden ratio keeps showing up works it through with a ladder and some addition.

Three dimensions. A mark in the record has to hold: no smooth motion can undo it. A pair of loops hooked through each other, like two links of a chain, is a mark like that. And two loops can hook in exactly three dimensions. In two they would have to cross, and in four or more one steps around the other. So space has three dimensions.⁴ Why space has three dimensions has the whole argument.

A shortest full pass of eight ticks. Give each of the three directions one yes-or-no and you get 2 × 2 × 2 = 8 combinations, the eight corners of a cube. A cycle that changes one yes-or-no per tick needs at least 8 ticks to touch every corner, and 8 is enough.⁵ The same three directions also set the eight in chemistry's octet rule: an outer shell has one round seat plus one seat for each direction, two electrons to a seat, 2 × (3 + 1) = 8. That's why chemistry runs on eight.

Zoom out. Step 5 is done. The record has a shape nobody picked: one price list J, levels that step by 1.618, three dimensions, and a shortest full pass of eight ticks. Next, and why: the price list is the one that prices holding a pattern, and holding a pattern is what mass is.

Step 6: Mass is the price of holding a pattern

Holding a pattern costs something, and that cost is the pattern's mass.

In ordinary physics a particle's mass is the energy it holds at rest, in different units: that's what E = mc² says. Here that energy is the price of holding the pattern. Mass isn't a number stamped on a particle. It's what the pattern costs to keep.

The price list from Step 5 does the pricing, the same J that prices every difference. There isn't a second price list for particles. A pattern is held at some ratio x against its reference level, the base it's measured from. If it holds balance, x = 1, it costs nothing. If it holds any other ratio, it costs a fixed unit times J(x).

Worked out: ratio 2 costs 1/4 of a unit. Ratio 4 costs (4 + 1/4) / 2 - 1 = 9/8 of a unit. Ratio 1/4 costs the same 9/8, because J(x) = J(1/x). The further a pattern is held from balance, the more it costs. These ratios are examples. None of them is a particle's.

Zoom out. Step 6 is done. A pattern that holds has a price, one unit times J of the ratio it's held at, and that price is its mass. Next, and why: one piece of the picture isn't finished yet, and you should know exactly which.

Where this stops

Yeah-But has one more question, and it's the obvious one. "So which pattern is the electron?"

Here's the edge, plainly. We haven't yet worked out which patterns are the electron, the quarks and the rest, what ratio each one is held at, or how big one unit of price is. Until we do, we can't say what any of them weighs. Of the fourteen particle numbers we're working toward, twelve masses and two mass ratios, none is derived yet, and the masses page shows where each one stands.

What's in place is the kind of thing an electron is, and what its mass means: a pattern that holds, and the price of holding it. What's missing is the lookup: which pattern, at which price. The four rhythms from Step 3 show what lasting looks like, and nothing yet matches any of them to a particle.

The whole trip, in one breath

Everything is made of events: differences, registered and written into one permanent record that never erases anything. One tiny process writes it, two units passing a bit, one entry per pass. Of the 64 ways that process can start, 60 fall into coin flips within three ticks and exactly 4 keep an unbroken rhythm forever, so what lasts in the record is rhythm, not stuff. A thing is the pattern of entries it keeps writing, which is why a flame stays a flame while all its material changes, and why you stay you. The record has a shape nobody picked: one price for being different, levels that step by 1.618, three dimensions, a shortest full pass of eight ticks. Mass is the price of holding a pattern. Which pattern is the electron is where our work stops.

Next time you put your hand flat on a table, here's what you're touching: a rhythm that holds, written one new entry at a time. Everything you've ever touched is one.

And if a table is entries, what about the entries in a coffee mug? Are they felt? That's Is Your Coffee Mug Conscious?

(The Ledger would like you to know that it noted every entry in your table while you read this. It's a lot of entries. It says it doesn't mind.)